


Deep, Dark Roots

by devilinthedetails



Series: A Hundred Drabbles [16]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Acceptance, Fear, Gen, Jedi Training, Light Side, Loss, Yoda as a Padawan, dagobah, dark side
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25921678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Yoda's Master introduces him to the Dark Side cave on Dagobah.
Series: A Hundred Drabbles [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880980
Kudos: 1





	Deep, Dark Roots

Ancient Planet

Dagobah was a world of contradictions. It was old but constantly remaking itself. It was green and dappled with patches of light and dark. The cave beneath the gnarl-tree where Yoda’s Master led him through the tangles of vines and slurping swamps was ancient and deeply rooted in the Dark Side.

It was a cave of evil, Yoda thought, sweat making his beige robes stick to his forest-green skin. Bugs flitted around his fluted ears, and he batted them away, not wanting his hot blood to become a drink for the butcherbugs and bogwings.

Lasting Darkness

Nothing lasted but the Dark Side, Yoda felt as he stared at the cave, a shiver slithering up his spine like a vine snake. Buried beneath brambles, crumbling stone steps descended into the cave’s eternal darkness. A hollow at the heart of the tree made a second, natural entrance into the void.

“A Dark Side vergence, is it?” Yoda’s ears folded on themselves.

“It mirrors our fears, reflecting them in apparitions and illusions.” Yoda’s Master brushed his shoulder.

“Made it, what did?” Yoda’s orb eyes fixed unblinking on the cave.

“We do with our fears.” His Master’s words weren’t reassuring.

Timeless Epoch

Yoda’s Master ordered him to enter the cave, and, knees trembling, he obeyed. It seemed to take him an eternity to be swallowed by the cave, but eventually he disappeared into the void, consumed by the Dark Side that encircled and entrapped him like a cold tomb.

The cave made him stand alone, frozen in his fears, for a timeless epoch, before it drowned him in deceptively real images of death and despair. In the blackness, each heartbeat seemed to last a century, each breath an eon. Yoda sensed that disorienting timelessness was the atmosphere the cave strove to maintain. 

Death without Descendants

The cave’s malice and menace could endure for a thousand years. Most Jedi wouldn’t live to be a thousand because most weren’t members of a species blessed—or perhaps cursed—with the longevity of Yoda’s. They would die like the Jedi who had nurtured and nourished him in the creche.

He had taken fifty years to reach the human equivalent of two so he had lost so many teachers and knew with bone-aching certainty that the loss of more awaited him.

Visions of death danced around him until he came face to face with his own death without descendants.

Ephemeral Flesh

Struck by how ephemeral—how like a butterfly wing—life was, Yoda fled from the cave that felt like his own tomb.

Watching a silver-nape beetle crawl across a leaf, Yoda asked the question that had haunted him in the cave as he gazed into the void, “Think do you ever that have a million descendants a common silver-nape beetle will, but no descendants will a Jedi have?”

“You’ll leave a long life and teach many students,” his Master murmured. “Your students will be your descendants, not of the ephemeral, limited flesh, but of the eternal, boundless spirit.”


End file.
